There Oughta Be A Law - But Not Resembling These

Imagine young women not drinking coffee after 6 p.m. for fear they'd be hit with a fine, or men not wearing bow ties because it would hurt their credibility.

Laws on those subjects and many that are more unbelievable were on the books, according to Jerri Burket, who speaks about obsolete and ridiculous laws and the rational or irrational explanations for how they came to be.

Burket, a Pennsylvania Power & Light Co. computer analyst, has talked about the subject since 1981, when she became a member of PP&L's Speakers Bureau.

After reading books on the history of coffee, Burket made an educated guess on the reason behind the coffee-drinking law passed in Corvallis, Ore.

Coffee was looked on as a sexual stimulant and considered bad for your health.

Why the curfew? "It's kind of like when your mother said you had to be in before dark because you wouldn't do anything bad in the daylight," Burket said.

Economic battles between the tea growers and coffee growers spawned rumors - Burket calls them marketing ploys - that drinking coffee wasn't healthy many years before restaurants and supermarkets were serving up decaffeinated brands.

People hanging onto their British heritage spurned the early coffee, which was strong and bitter, as not being their cup of tea, Burket said.

Men with bow ties in Groton, Conn., might have had a hard time convincing anyone of anything. The law said you didn't have to believe anything said by a man wearing a bow tie.

Burket speculated that many of the zany laws were passed because of isolated incidents. "In this case, it's probably against some person up there who was really obnoxious and wore bow ties," she said.

In Maine, it was illegal to bite your landlord. In New York City, shooting rabbits from the back of the 3rd Avenue trolley while the car was moving was prohibited.

It was against the law to drive more than 2,000 sheep at one time down California's Hollywood Boulevard.

Visitors to Alaska were in violation of the law if they disturbed a grizzly bear to take its picture.

Sound like common sense? Maybe not, Burket said, recalling an incident she witnessed in Yellowstone National Park last year.

"A woman kicked a male buffalo in the rump because she wanted a picture of it standing up. I saw people doing the weirdest things around wild animals. I thought maybe that was the reason they had some of these ridiculous laws," she said. "Some people just don't think."

Some legislation outlaws actions that most people would see as obvious, such as using a rifle to remove icicles from a building. Rhode Island invented that one.

Laws possibly harking back to Victorian times frowned on Reading women who hung their underclothes outside without a screen around them and Montana residents who put men's and women's underwear on the same clothes line.

Some little-known laws hint at a subtle discrimination. In Massachusetts, a restaurateur would be on the wrong side of the law for putting tomatoes in clam chowder.

"Sometimes in a community where you grow up with certain customs, they have problems with people coming into the community from someplace else," Burket said. "It's the old group rejecting the new group and saying they don't want their kids to learn about it. It's the reaction of people to different ideas."

A small California town near the Mexican border had passed a law saying you couldn't wear cowboy boots unless you owned at least two cows.

Kansas had enacted an unusual blue law prohibiting the eating of rattlesnake meat on Sundays.

Certain Indian tribes used rattlesnakes in their rituals. Puritanical forces at work prohibited that without actually saying it was religious discrimination, she said.

Other lawmakers were less evasive about their intentions.

In the mid-1800s, Pennsylvania had a law that said, "Idiots, incompetents and married women are not allowed to enter into contracts."

In 1893 it was amended to allow married women to buy sewing machines for their own use without their husbands' signatures, "which I thought was real nice of them," Burket said.

An 1873 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court raises the ire of women's groups she addresses.

An Illinois woman, trained to be an attorney, was forbidden admission to the bar. She appealed, but the high court didn't give her relief.

The court wrote:

"It certainly cannot be assumed, as an historical fact, that this (the right to pursue any lawful occupation) has ever been established as one of the fundamental privileges and immunities of the sex. On the contrary, the civil law, as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life . . . the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator."